Antique Metal Machine Music

The chamber-pop perfectionists of Musée Mécanique ready their second album. It’s about damn time.

Sean Ogilvie and Micah Rabwin, the 33-year-old founding
members of Portland folk quintet Musée Mécanique, are casually sitting
on the sandy shore of Sellwood Riverfront Park. The breeze ripples the
water as the two longtime friends talk fondly about their neighborhood
sanctuary. Here, ships and boats come and go, occasionally stopping to
drop anchor near the riverbank. People lounge behind magazines, with
Oaks Amusement Park and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge just visible through
the park’s northernmost trees.

This place—and others
similar to it—is where Ogilvie and Rabwin found much of the inspiration
for their group’s first album in five years, From Shores of Sleep.
While it won’t be officially released until early next year, the band
will perform the album in full this week, in its first live show in two
years. Considering those gaps in productivity, the band has truly tested
the patience of its fan base. But Musée Mécanique makes no apologies
for taking its time.

“One thing we learned
a year into making the record is, you can’t put too much pressure on
this album to be finished because it’s just going to take its own time,”
Ogilvie says. “I want it to be a place to go to. I want it to be
another world that inspires your imagination to go somewhere else.”

Indeed, when it comes
to production, Musée Mécanique emphasizes patience and craft.
Fittingly, the band is named after a family-owned museum in San
Francisco that houses a collection of antique coin-operated instruments
and arcade games, and its music is reminiscent of those intricate,
delicately handmade machines. Its sound is timeless and imaginatively
evocative, built with finely composed layers of wispy vocals and
instruments, including strings, brass, woodwinds, glockenspiel, old
synthesizers, keyboards and saws. For Ogilvie and Rabwin, spending
copious amounts of time perfecting every production detail furthers
their appreciation for the contraptions in the museum that is the
group’s namesake.

“You put in a quarter, and you see
this whole thing unfold that’s been so crafted to play maybe one, two,
three songs,” Ogilvie says. “That’s kind of what our music felt like at a
certain point. Everything was a little world in and of itself.”

Ogilvie and Rabwin first played
together 20 years ago, after meeting in school in San Diego. In the
subsequent years, they bounced around the California coastline before
eventually moving in 2005 to Portland, where they solidified the idea of
Musée Mécanique. Renting an old Victorian house in Sellwood, they
brought in Matthew Berger, Brian Perez and Jeff Boyd—who’s since left
the group to pursue a teaching career—to record Hold This Ghost, a
sleepy set of 10 exquisitely arranged songs, in their basement studio.
“We finally got to start making something that was just ours,” Ogilvie says.

While Hold This Ghost is made up of songs that stand alone as separate tracks, From Shores of Sleep,
as Rabwin and Ogilvie explain, is more conceptual. Waterscapes—such as
the Sellwood riverfront and the coastal town of Astoria—contribute to
the overarching story of the album.

“Over the course of the record,
there’s a journey that’s, in my mind, a spatial journey you go on from
the shore, to an open sea, to underwater, to the river,” Rabwin says.
“All of those places are referenced in various ways, lyrically or with
the sound itself.”

Musée Mécanique fans still have months to wait until they can hold physical copies of From Shores of Sleep,
but the performance Saturday night will be the closest thing they’ve
had to a new album in five years. And it sounds like it will be even
more of a time-defying, dreamy journey than the last.